AI database workflows need approval gates, not vibes

AI should be fast at suggesting what to do.

It should be slow and deliberate when changing production state.

That difference is the job of approval gates.

For database-backed AI workflows, I’d separate the path like this:

• read-only inspection is the default
• risky actions become proposals first
• proposals include affected rows and evidence
• dry runs produce counts and before/after samples
• approval is scoped to one tenant/action/window
• mutation tools stay unavailable until approval exists
• every step lands in the audit trail

The approval should not be “the agent can now edit the database.”

It should be:

This specific operation, against this scoped row set, based on this dry run, approved by this person, at this time.

Longer version: Approval gates for AI database actions

The point is not to make AI slow.

The point is to make suggestions fast and production changes deliberate.